Ken Doctor

Patrick Soon-Shiong has finally won his hometown prize. After a number of years of trying to buy his local paper, Los Angeles’ richest billionaire has seized an unpredictable opportunity.   In a move that’s shocking but not really surprising, 65-year-old Soon-Shiong will pay a chunk of his estimated $7 billion-plus fortune to finally split with his erstwhile partner in Troncdom, chairman Michael Ferro.

Get ready to hear a lot about the “uberfication” of user-generated content. Yes, it’s a mouthful. But it’s also the next big thing. Fresco News, a two-year-old New York start-up, sees itself becoming a hot property as it cracks the code on local amateur content generation. I first wrote about Fresco [“The Uberfication of news”] as Tronc impresario (and chairman) Michael Ferro sought to buy the company in July, amid a frenzy of efforts to find lots of cheap-to-produce content to Tronc, the websites of the newspapers owned by the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing. Tronc’s effort to buy Fresco seems unlikely to succeed, as this hot company – several sources tell me – finds itself well-courted by more stable buyers. Both 21st Century Fox and AOL have shown buying interest as well as Tronc, confidential sources say.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see even greater interest given the priority many news companies, both legacy and start-up, have been lately giving to ad-friendly, video-delivered news. Still, it appears more likely that Fresco will remain an independent company, at least for now. Simply, Fresco News now enables local TV stations to assign, receive and quickly get on air and online lots of amateur-shot newsy videos in their metro area. Its secret sauce: Uberizing the supply chain process from station assignment to Fresco “qualified” shooter to shooting smartphone video to uploading and optimizing its quality for quick delivery to consumers, online or on the air.

[Commentary] Venture capitalists believe that, with the hard work of laying those digital pipes now behind us, there’s an enormous opportunity waiting for those who can figure out how to create an endless stream of content to flow through them.

Ken Lerer compares it to the content revolution he watched unfold in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cable television, at first little more than a punch line to the gatekeepers of the big three broadcast TV networks, had by this time built out its distribution pipes across the country. Soon, ABC, CBS and NBC were joined by dozens, then hundreds, of new channels.

The need for content exploded. New channels -- TNT, TBS, Bravo, National Geographic Channel and hundreds of others -- flowed into the vacuum, satisfying niche audiences and generating billions of dollars in profits.